It's been a couple days now since the My First Gamejam completed, and I'm happy we were able to get some visibility on the project.

@JSEBAC is working on some new music to swap out for my placeholder stuff I threw together in LMMS. We should have some idea of more longterm musical themes in about a week.

In the meantime, I've started implementing supporting code for Factions. I've had the idea for Swarmybots since 2010 and have always wanted it to be a faction-based territorial control game, but I've never really had much of a feeling for how and why players would be motivated to join a particular faction. I'm happy to report that today I've figured out the mechanic for how players will be joining a faction, and also how to motivate players to care about which faction they're on and what it means for their overall gameplay experience.

Shortly, I will be adding simple faction territorial control of the "World Arena" which you encounter after emerging from the first Burrow. Instead of emerging straight from the Nest into the Arena, at the end of the Nest players will exit via a warp gate, which will take them to a small neutral territory with NPC recruiters for the 3 factions. Players will receive invites from one of the factions and they can accept or decline, but they cannot leave the area until they accept one.

When I'm able to get some designs worked out, the World Arena will be replaced. Instead, from the recruitment zone, players will gain the ability to take a colored warp gate to their faction's home territory, and from there the game really begins.

Instead of having an Item Shop as I'd been thinking, we are going to physically place the access to skills and items throughout the world map. Each faction's general territorial regions (if things were divided perfectly evenly) will have the methods to access and unlock items and skills. The items/skills available will be only available in those territories, and the most advanced/powerful ones in the game will be toward the center in regions with higher-level NPCs, that will inevitably also become war front hotspots of high contention. Adding all these biases together means that in general your faction will largely determine what skills and abilities you have access to. But of course, players will want to have everything, so players will be able to switch factions probably once per week or maybe somewhat less frequently than that.

In terms of balance I intend for the factions to largely work like rock-paper-scissors where each is strong against one but weak against the other, which should lead to cycles of territory gain and loss.